Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

Post by Tarrosion » Sun, Nov 19, 2017, 9:52 PM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #44

wiz21c wrote: post #38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...

I’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Nov 19, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #49

bamboozled wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.

> improve the structure The key question is: Who would have paid for it? Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible. They also couldn't just decommission it once they reali…

Post by phkahler » Sun, Nov 19, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #8

Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

Post by eeZah7Ux » Sun, Nov 19, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #36

jjoonathan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.

Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.

Post by rurban » Sun, Nov 19, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #29

perlgeek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what they did in this particular instance, but basically there are two things you can do: shield, or in the case of electronics, use larger parts. The smaller some piece of electronics is, the smaller the charges in there are, and the easier it is to introduce errors with ionizing radiation.

And the design of the electronics might help with radiation tolerance. Computation paths could be redundant to detect/eliminate bit flips due to radiaton. (Some server Power cpus seem to run parallel in pairs, comparing the output at critical parts to detect cpu errors)